| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Case of The Lamp That Went Out by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: which sapped her strength and drank her life blood drop by drop. Any
hour might bring discovery, a discovery which she feared would shake
her husband's love for her. The poor weak little woman grew pale and
ill. She wrote finally to her step-brother, but he could think of no
way out; he wrote only that if the matter came to a scandal there
would be nothing for him to do but to kill himself. This was one
reason more for her silence, and Mrs. Thome faded to a wan shadow of
her former sunny self.
As she looked down from the balcony, she was like a woman suffering
from a deathly illness. A new terror had come to her heart because
her husband had gone away so early without telling her why or whither
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: prophetic eye extends beyond them to the false teachers of other ages who
are the creatures of the government under which they live. He compares the
corruption of his contemporaries with the idea of a perfect society, and
gathers up into one mass of evil the evils and errors of mankind; to him
they are personified in the rhetoricians, sophists, poets, rulers who
deceive and govern the world.
A further objection which Plato makes to poetry and the imitative arts is
that they excite the emotions. Here the modern reader will be disposed to
introduce a distinction which appears to have escaped him. For the
emotions are neither bad nor good in themselves, and are not most likely to
be controlled by the attempt to eradicate them, but by the moderate
The Republic |
